The Flock

How long has it been?
40 years? 45?
Such a long time to be alone.
Yet, not alone.
Or, was I simply lost in a crowd?
Maybe that’s closest to the truth.
Lost in a crowd of people who claimed to be family.
Yet, they weren’t quite.
Am I alone? Or, am I part of something larger?

In our Western, particularly U.S., culture an odd creature was birthed.
This creature had no apparent need for anyone else.
No nature; no nurture.
It just sort of “appeared” in our collective popular mythos.

Over time this creature became known as “The Rugged Individual.”

Those of us old enough to remember will recall this creature seated atop a strong horse with mountains in the background. He was smoking a Marlboro cigarette.

Perhaps this creature was born out of our nation’s desire to cut ties with ancestral homelands and make a go of it as a New Nation that needed no one else. No king or pope or other “authority” was going to tell us what to do. We are an Individual Nation.

Or, maybe the whole idea of the Rugged Individual has always been somewhere sleeping, latent within our individual psyches.

I really don’t know.

What I do know, now, is that while this creature surely exists, it is surely  a lie.

It is a dangerous lie, to boot.

Now, I can take this idea in several directions.

I could make it a defense of Socialism. After all, isn’t Socialism ultimately a critique of individual accomplishment? Doesn’t it strike at the heart of MY will and well-being having preeminence over the will and well-being of the collective?

No, I’m not going there. Maybe some other time.

I could touch on Hillary Clinton’s 1996 book “It Takes a Village” to discuss how we must work together as a “village” to properly raise our children.

While that is an excellent topic for discussion, it’s not what I have in mind here.

No, I think that I want to touch on something a bit more personal. Something that has impacted me, my family, and my community at a visceral level. It has chipped away at my soul and my mind to create something that doesn’t quite resemble the Rugged Individual. Nor, does it quite fit as a piece of some ethereal ‘Whole.’

It actually quite resembles the confused person described at the beginning of this post.

For quite a long time I’ve tried to discover my place in life. You know, trying to answer those unanswerable questions like “Why am I here”? What’s the meaning of life? Why is there air? (Uh, no, that’s not one of them. The answer to that is obvious: to fill soccer balls.)

When I first came to faith in Christ as a 16 year old idealist, I was taught that God loved ME. In fact, God loved ME so much that if I had been the only human on earth, Jesus would still come to give His life so that I could live. I participated in a Billy Graham event where he preached a message that claimed that I could not be saved unless I made a confession of MY PERSONAL sin and received Jesus as MY PERSONAL savior. It was all about ME and MY and MINE. Graham wasn’t the first to explain faith in this way. The concept he preached has been around since at least the time of John Calvin. But, it found fertile soil in this nation of Rugged Individuals who saw God vindicating their Rugged Individualism. God didn’t save a collective. No! That was a communist plot! God saved ME!

But, then I met a bunch of hippies who believed in God. I started to hang with them. We were part of a larger movement that became known as the Jesus Movement. (Profound. I wish that I could have helped them come up with a better handle. Anyway, I digress.) Together we began to play around with the concept of Community. We tried to model this new thing after what we understood about the early Church as described in the first few chapters of the Acts of the Apostles. These prototype Jesus People sold their belongings and put the proceeds in a community account that all could draw from as needed. COOL! They cared for one another as sisters and brothers in a large extended family. STILL COOL! They shared all things in common and lived together in peace and harmony. WAY COOL!

We found out that the Bible talked a lot about how we should live together in love. We were a Kingdom of Priests and a Holy Nation. This is the language of community and togetherness. And, this all came at a time in our nation’s trek through history when we desperately needed such a concept. We had become fragmented as a people. Race; War; Politics. It seemed that all of the powers of the Universe had conspired to break our world into little pieces. We needed to try and find some cohesiveness. There was something embedded deep in our human DNA that cried out for an end to the splintering of our world. So, these ideas from the Bible resonated with us.

But, we still held on tightly to our identities as Rugged Individuals. After all, that concept had been drilled into us for generations. It would not simply sit back and say, “Oh, right, community. That’s cool. I’ll just pack up and leave.”

No. We still, after all that we were learning about our interdependence, militantly held on to our independence. So, we changed the story a bit. We started to preach that God made us for one another. To live together in true Christian community. But, to join you needed to confess YOUR INDIVIDUAL sin and accept Jesus as YOUR INDIVIDUAL savior. Hmmm…not much of a difference there.

Eventually, we made some emendations. We elevated Family to the place of an actual individual. So, now our community could be called a Family of Families. Isn’t that sweet? This became a point of contention with me at a former church. The church leadership insisted that the Eucharist, the celebration of Communion, should be celebrated within the confines of the family unit. So, the head of each ‘household’ came up and received the bread and wine. They then took the elements back to their INDIVIDUAL families to share. For me, this practice was, and is, antithetical to the whole concept of the sacrament. But, that’s a subject for another post.

So, why have I spent this time and more than 1,000 words to say all of this?

A week ago the priest of the church I now attend talked about a parable that Jesus taught. It was about a certain shepherd who realized that one of his sheep was missing. Now, he still had 99 sheep that were safe and sound. But, being the dutiful shepherd, he left the 99 and sought out the missing sheep. This story has been used over the years to show how much Jesus cares about the INDIVIDUAL. He will abandon 99 and leave them to the elements and go off in order to seek and save the lost ONE. Wow! I’m really pretty important to Jesus!

And, that my friends, is the point that people using this text want to make. It appeals to our emotions in a deep way. It paints the portrait of No One Left Behind. It appeases our Rugged Individual.

Is that what God intended for the story?

Well, maybe. In part.

But, perhaps there is another take away from it. A way to understand it in the light of one of the overarching themes of the entire Bible.

Throughout the Scriptures there is the idea that God is forming a People. He is in the business of Nation building. Images of sheep, (plural), and goats and lambs and flocks abound in its pages.

What if the story of the lost sheep is more about the condition of the flock than the lost sheep?

What if it’s the flock,restored to wholeness, that is the point of the story?

I think it is.

I think that unless we can get beyond ourselves as individuals and drive a stake into the heart of the Rugged Individual we, as people, will suffer. Unless we can reach even beyond that and somehow see that we are not just a single species, but part of a greater community made up of all of the Cosmos, we will suffer.

God, in the beginning created Adam. He created THEM. And, then graciously placed THEM in a Garden full of their fellow creatures to live and thrive TOGETHER.